Thanks Peter. I have tried what you suggested but am still getting the message "please insert blanks cd-r in drive e and retry" when i try to burn. I am not confident about looking inside the tower to check connections and i am pretty sure these will be ok as the tower never gets moved or disturbed. when i insert a blank cdr the green light on the device flashes rapidly. could the problem be that i may have deleted something in the registry while using "registry mechanic" or an update downloaded from windows or symantec? The problem only seemed to start after doing these things.